Eternal Darkness – Scott Clifford
Eternal Darkness was a psychological horror video game that was released exclusively for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2002. The game revolves around Alexandra Roivas, a confident young woman who comes across a mysterious book called the, “Tome of Eternal Darkness” while investigating her grandfather’s murder. This book takes her through the adventures of various people throughout history as they try to stop an ancient evil god from destroying the world. The game’s calling card was the use of unique “sanity effects” to enhance the game play and scare the player. I still remember having a heart attack when the game pretended that it was deleting my entire memory card instead of saving my game.
Why would this game make a great movie?
Eternal Darkness has a lot of great elements that will appeal to moviegoers. It has action, cosmic horror, a strong female protagonist, and strong supporting characters of multiple ethnicities. More importantly, it will be a horror film that will make you poop your pants. Horror films are one of the few genres that still pull mainstream audiences into the theatre due to the bigger screen and the potential use of “sanity effects” can really take advantage of that. Seriously, you will poop your pants.
Also, from a business perspective, executives could easily decide to split the property into a television series as well as a movie if they want to. It’s all about that multimedia blitz.
How would I want it made?
There are two ways to make this film in my opinion. The first way would follow the journeys of Alexandra (the protagonist) and her distant ancestor, Pious Augustus (the antagonist). The audience could see how Pious goes from noble Roman general to evil immortal villain as Alex goes from naïve college student to confident hero. This way we can have satisfying character arcs while going through different time periods in the story.
The second way would be having a movie just about Pious’s character journey from hero to villain. This would serve as Gladiator meets H.P. Lovecraft prequel to an Eternal Darkness television series.
As of right now I would choose the first option but I wouldn’t complain if they went with the second one.
Dream director, cast, etc.
There is only one man that I want to direct this. That man is Guillermo Del Toro. He is exceptional at directing actors while using a lot of special effects. He has only been trying to get a cosmic horror movie off the ground for a while now and Eternal Darkness fits the bill perfectly.
For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to just stick with the two main characters for casting since there are a lot of side characters in the game that may or may not end up being featured in the film adaptation.
Casting Alexandra Roivas is tough because I feel that an unknown actress should play her. This way it will be easier for the audience to empathize with the crazy things that are happening to the character as she goes insane instead of thinking something such as, “Man, Scarlett Johannsen is in a weird movie. Did she get a new agent?” At the same time, executives hate hiring someone completely new for a feature film so I went digging for blonde actresses on IMDB. Eventually a friend of mine told me about AnnaLynne McCord. Most people know her from the reboot of 90210 in 2008 but it was her role in an indie film called Excision in 2012 that made me respect her acting ability. She plays a teenager with mental issues that likes to imagine that she is drowning in her own menstrual blood while engaging in intercourse with various men. She also suffers from other hallucinations as she tries to graduate high school and become a doctor. Yeah that’s pretty crazy. Eternal Darkness seems tame by comparison.
On the other end of the spectrum, Pious Augustus is easy to cast. Who doesn’t want to see Russell Crowe become an evil, immortal general who wants to help an ancient god consume the world? Case closed.
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